The present invention relates to an apparatus for sequentially displaying a plurality of pages, and in particular, to an image display apparatus suitable for the user to search for a desired image by visually confirming each image while sequentially browsing through a great amount of images.
In the prior art technology, as described in JP-A-58-84365, the images are only displayed in an overlapped fashion with a slight difference therebetween to confirm the number of the classified images. Considerations have not been given to the points that the overlapped display is used to search for a plurality of images and to flip pages containing images in either directions, namely, in the forward and backward directions so as to display the pages. A retrieval operation in which the user visually confirms each page to search for a desired image while browsing through a great amount of images requires a bidirectional sequential image display quite easily comprehensible for the operator in which the retrieved images are displayed in the forward flipping order and/or in the backward flipping order.
Moreover, in an image retrieval, each page of image is required to be read from a mass storage device such as an optical disk so as to be displayed on a display apparatus. A certain period of time (1-2 seconds) is necessary to read a desired image from a mass storage device such as an optical disk. In order to instantaneously (0.1 second) display the page in response to an indication from the operator like in the case where the reader flips pages of a book, the images from the optical disk are required to be temporarily stored in a high-speed buffer memory such as a semiconductor memory.
Furthermore, in the image retrieval operation, it is also important to have information indicating the current number of image pages that have been loaded from the optical disk to the high-speed buffer memory such as a semiconductor memory.
Therefore, this enables to provide the operator with information that the image to be found can be instantaneously displayed or a certain time is required before the image is displayed, thereby reducing the psychological uneasiness of the operator. As described above, according to the prior art technology, the retrieval of a plurality of images has not been sufficiently considered.